


Possiblies, drawn and painted

by untilourapathy (gwendolen_lotte)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Frida is the star of the show xx, Genderfluid Character, Muggle London, Post-Break Up, Reconciliation, flangst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 08:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13360161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendolen_lotte/pseuds/untilourapathy
Summary: Padma grows into herself and into love.





	Possiblies, drawn and painted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GingerTodgers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerTodgers/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Crescent Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258626) by [GingerTodgers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerTodgers/pseuds/GingerTodgers). 



Padma hadn’t told Pav she’d stopped seeing Millie because Pav was going through her own thing. Something about her first love returning to the UK after 5 years of panicpanicpanic, about where Lav was and whether Lav was dead and whether Lav hated Pav forever. Turns out that in the end, Pav’d been invited for a coffee, subtext included. Padma didn’t quite know what to think. 

Also, a little bit of her wanted to keep her heartbreak to herself. It’d be easier, she told herself, without the prying questions. That might’ve meant she’d have to revaluate her own behaviour, too. She didn’t even know what she and Millie were, to be fair. Lovers? She cringed. They certainly weren’t partners, but maybe, just maybe, possibly dating. Is dating when you just go on dates, or when you go on dates with added intention? For four, five months?

Oh well, it didn’t quite matter now. Possiblies didn’t matter when they were in the past. She’d been through the stages of despair with a bottle of boxed red wine from ASDA, her new best friend. Maybe she was a bit of an emotional masochist. There was something very satisfying, albeit so so sad about wallowing in her own feelings. Extremely unhealthy, she knew, but what else was there to do with her time? She couldn’t go back to all the pottery lessons and the tango class and the British Museum _now_. Not without her arm linked cheerily into Millie’s, stomping down St John’s Wood in the tired Adidas Gazelles she’d nicked off Pav, now clay-covered with Millie’s initials painted on. She’d just feel that empty space by her side, where Millie used to be, all the more acutely. 

She did love Millie. In her own way, she had done. And now Millie was gone. 

But she’d been through the stages of grief, when Millie had sent her that Owl. _I don’t think we should see each other anymore._

(That was possibly not what the Owl had said, Padma may have tried to romanticise it a bit to dull the pain, but in the past, possiblies don’t matter.)

The stages of grief, then. Shock and disbelief, ever a pair; outrage and despair, the dichotomy that left her all cried-out, stacks of Kleenex Balsam by her bed, in her bed, on her stomach. She felt like an art exhibit. _Sculpture of a Girl, Freshly Broken Up With._ Disappointment, embarrassment, confusion. The keening space by her side, where Millie used to fit so well. 

In the stages of grief, she’d be at numb, right now. Numb was an odd word. N-u-m-b. _Numb_. 

She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and held them there, for a minute or five. She rolled over and finished her glass and put _To Have and Have Not_ on for the fourth time that week, hoping that the CD wouldn’t give out. 

She waited for the tears to come.

*

In the spirit of pretending that she was _absolutely fine, Pav, really,_ she decided to step back into routine. In these last few months, that included pretending to smoke, going to a variety of art classes with Millie, and on occasion, watching old films outdoors, lying on damp grass with crappy champers in one hand and Millie’s hand in her other. She decided that heading back to her old pottery lessons was the most attainable for someone who hadn’t left the house in six days, and who also didn’t much like to smoke. 

It had nothing to do with the fact that Millie usually went on Tuesdays. Not at all. She tugged on her paint-spattered clothes, mementos of their time together drawn on. A patch on her trousers, whitened with clay, ink indelibly left on her white peasant top from that calligraphy class that one time, a burn mark on her cardy from when they’d tried to blow glass together, on a spontaneous trip to Murano. 

Four tube stops later, she was back at their old haunt. And when she said old, she meant that the last time they’d been there was last week. But now she was Padma, not one half of Millie-and-Padma. She stole the Frida Kahlo stool from the back of the room and vowed that she wouldn’t turn to look at who was in attendance that day. There was enough self-flagellation in the contents of the letters she hadn’t sent. She didn’t need more.

She let herself get lost in the art, which, translated, meant that she was angrily throwing colours at the canvas until it all blurred into one muddy off-brown colour that was more grey than anything else. Four lashings of paint in, she collapsed onto Frida Kahlo’s face, looking at her mangled palette a little dejectedly.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ came a gravelly voice. 

‘Haha,’ Padma choked out, refusing to turn around. ‘Hahaha I know right? So funny. Complete surprise.’

It was a bad idea. She shouldn’t’ve come. Shouldn’t’ve lobbed her hair since she’d last saw Millie, shouldn’t have put on her clay-spattered camo cargoes, shouldn’t have forgone a bra underneath her peasant top. 

‘I like your hair,’ Millie continued. They were always rather more collected than Padma was. ‘Suits you. I think you look more like yourself, this way. Not that you need or want my opinion, or anything.’

‘You like it, then. Odd, because you didn’t seem to like _me_ , in your letter.’

That was an accident. Padma really, really shouldn’t’ve said that. Fuck.

‘I just said that you seemed a bit lost,’ Millie went on, seemingly unhurt. ‘Pav and I had been chatting, you know, about how you needed to find yourself, and your identity – ’

‘Oh,’ Padma said, tone arched, ‘you’ve been talking about me behind my back? With my fucking sister, of all people? And also, right, _could_ you get any more patronising? This ‘finding myself’ bullshit, yeah, I’m fine. I’m Padma. I like art. That’s why I’m here. It’s nothing to do with you and how I like you.’

‘You like me? Like, properly?’

‘Well, _yeah_. Was that not obvious, in the last, what, five months that we’ve been – we’ve been going out?’

Millie paused. Padma turned her head warily, ever so slowly. ‘Not really, Pads, if I’m being honest. You seemed to like the dates, but we hadn’t really talked about what we had going on, if you will. You seemed so reticent about it. You didn’t seem particularly, like, into me or anything. Honestly? I felt like I was a distraction for you. A way for you to pass the time. Go on nice dates, snog a bit, that was that. You weren’t invested, not like I was.’

Padma paused. ‘I told you I loved you.’ Her voice cracked on the last word, burrowing her head into the crook of her arm.

Millie tilted her head, taking Padma’s hand with the brush in it and holding it for a bit. ‘I know. But it didn’t seem like an _I love you_ I love you. It didn’t seem anything beyond what you’d say to any of your friends that’d you’d say a quick ‘love you’ to. And I didn’t need to get hurt if I stayed, not if the relationship was going to continue to be lopsided.’

Mills looked across the art classroom, eyes landing on their own painting. It seemed symbolic, somehow, but Padma didn’t quite get it. ‘But I’m sorry I misinterpreted you if you meant it,’ Millie resumed, coughing. Padma really thought she should stop smoking, and took her clammy hand out of Millie’s grasp. ‘Did you, Padma?’

Padma tensed on her stool, Frida Kahlo’s face beneath her. Frida looked like she was judging her. She shuffled further forward so her bum was completely covering Frida’s face. ‘I don’t know, really. What does it feel like, to be in love?’ She whispered the last part, not willing to think about what Millie had just said. She really had bollocksed it up, hadn’t she. Really had. Her first instinct was to snog them, to tell them it was all going to be fab. They both liked each other. Everything was fine. They’d resume their dance lessons and art classes and trips to the gallery. They could pick up where they’d left off and Padma could throw away her break up CD she’d made. 

But a little part of her got what Millie was trying to say. Maybe they were two people who did like each other, after all. But it didn’t mean they’d be good together. She blinked hard, hoping that she didn’t look as wobbly as she felt as she looked up at Millie. Who had been standing there all this time, both literally and figuratively. Waiting, waiting for her. 

But it wasn’t fair to make her wait any longer. She’d have to let her go. 

She repeated the question, a little louder this time. ‘What’s it like then, to be in love?’

Millie looked at her with broken eyes. ‘To me? It’s so unmistakable you’ll ever wonder how you lived without it.’ Then they turned and left, not even stopping to collect their canvas. 

Padma shivered, ostensibly from the draught that Millie’s departure let in. ‘Bit dramatic, that,’ she mumbled, trying to play it off. She saved that titbit away to ponder over for thirty to fifty minutes later, for when she was in the bath with her shitty boxed red. 

*

It had been a month or two since Padma had last seen Millie and Padma had officially been single for half the time that she had been dating them. That, according to Parvati, who had known all along, was the end of her allocated moping time. ‘Onwards and upwards’, Pav had said. Or something like that, at least.

So here Padma was, using the break up as a fantastic excuse to implement all sorts of new habits. Self-indulgent things. Padma things. Things she did for herself, because she wanted to. Going for coffee in overpriced little shops in Shoreditch, hanging round the tea houses in WC1, looking in the remainder bookshops by the Muggle unis, leaving coated in dust. And, it seemed, taking Lav’s clipped Crup out for a walk, as by now, Pav and Lav were living in each other’s pockets again. There was talk of moving in, she knew, but then Padma’d be left all alone and there was the question of rent, what they were to do with the extra room and so forth. 

And if she was walking the Crup through St James’ Park while wearing Millie’s yellow aviators that she’d left behind, no one needed to know. It went with her oversized gold hoops and velour tracksuit and that was that. Fit her vibe, yes it did. Athletic chic, that was what she was going for. Never mind that she never exercised.

As she was busy pondering on the status of her new and improved singlehood, she was veered sharply to the left by Lav’s Crup. ‘Polls! Polly, slow down,’ she insisted, jogging after Polly as she tugged on the pink leash. ‘Polly! Sto – ’

She froze when she saw what Polly was leading her to. Or who, rather. Millie. Shit, it was Millie. Millie, denim-clad, looking just as shocked as Padma was. They were holding a few wildflowers that they had presumably just picked. 

‘Hi,’ Padma said, surprisingly breathless and feeling a little sick. She frowned. She hadn’t run _that_ hard. 

Oh, she thought, as she took the proffered bouquet. 

This was what it was like to fall in love.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Kat for betaing!!
> 
> Ginger, I hope you like it! I loved the hint of Millie/Padma in Crescent Moon and knew I had to explore it. I tried a new style(ish) so I'm a bit uncertain of what I think of it all. But thank you so much for being the wonderful, encouraging person that you are! I hope I've done Crescent Moon justice xx


End file.
